LED Audio Visualizer

Inspiration

We are all in the Association of Computing Machinery and there is a smaller group that learns about sound so we decided to do something sound related.

What it does

Using a Raspberry Pi, our project is able to play a sound file and at the same time light leds that act as a visualizer for the amplitude at the current point in the song.

How we built it

We connected the GPIO ports on a raspberry pi to be able to control individual leds, and the code inside plays the sound file and then analyzes the amplitudes and stores them in an array. We then use each element in the array to activate a certain amount of leds to display the visualizer.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty with importing certain libraries at first with the raspberry pi. Most of the problems came from the process of analyzing a wav file and finding the amplitude at a certain point. We also had some difficulties with making sure the leds would light at the right time in the song.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to light the leds using our code and make them turn off and on even though it didn't match the music at first. When we were able to calculate the values to make the leds light up depending on the song length.

What we learned

How to use different python libraries and how to import them, how to analyze sound files and how to draw a list of frequencies and amplitudes.